Ratking Playtest Rules

No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here.

Ratking is a miniatures agnostic skirmish game in which you, a Schememonger, use playing cards to command Cellar Bands of the Burial’s most desperate denizens, sending them into the subterranean expanse’s war-blighted center. Here, the curse of the Hundred-Headed King, murdered at the many hands of his generals and advisors, channels the saturating resentment of the millions who perished in the power struggle he left in his wake. Fight over relic-scraps from a lost age in Cisterns—hungering tombs adrift in a shifting geography of sewer tunnel, catacomb, and cavern hall. These are places haunted by radiation and irradiated with spectral resentment, and Rats who linger over-long in these places may themselves forced together by a shadowy claw, bound by tail and entrail to friend or foe—a nascent vessel of royal reincarnation, bent on eviscerating any graverobber it finds.

Matches begin as vicious king-of-the-hill encounters in the claustrophobic ruins, the players using the limited resource of playing cards to scurry to opportune positions, skulk in the muck, and murder Rats with blade, bullet, and malevolent spellcraft—all this a desperate bid to find Treasures in the Midden. At any point, however, two Rats might become Entangled, escape your command, and rampage through the Cistern as a Ratking, growing ever-larger with each new Rat it kills.

I encourage you to make up supplemental rules for this game as you see fit. Rip it to shreds. Build something worse.